No, they'd have paid exactly what they want to. If they want the movie to make no profit, they'll charge HBO nothing, or perhaps they'd have the gall to have _HBO charge the movie studio part of warner_ a fee for showing it on HBO, perhaps filing that away as 'marketing expenses' or some similar scam. Anybody with monkey points (entitled to a cut of the net earnings) is out of luck.

Conversely if they want it to be a windfall for some reason they charge HBO idiotic amounts of money for the distro rights, which HBO will happily pay because Warner tells them to do so.

That's exactly hollywood accounting.

I have no idea if it was actually 'done' to the matrix here.